Ralph will very shortly be turning ONE. Holy Mole.

I made him the cake below for a small family party today. Essentially it is my favourite banana cake recipe, which I’ve written about for the lovely wee days blog here. I increased the recipe by a third, which made the quantities quite easy to work with (for example, four bananas and four eggs, instead of three). This meant I had enough extra mixture to pour off three cupcakes worth into a muffin tin. These became the ears and an extra cupcake for the candle, as I didn’t want to put it on the monkey’s face.

The icing I used was from a ridiculously rich recipe, which I adapted from Smitten Kitchen, as follows:

375g icing sugar
225g butter
4 1/2 Tablespoons milk
2 tsp vanilla extract
120g dark chocolate, melted 

Blend all of the above in a food processor, except the chocolate. Take out 1/2 of a cup of icing for the ‘face’, then add the chocolate and blend some more. I then split the cake and filled it with a layer of chocolate icing. I added a large teaspoon of the chocolate icing to the lighter icing to make it a light brown colour. I used a plastic bag with the corner cut off to pipe the shape of the face around a template I had made then filled it in. This recipe is *extremely* rich icing, very American the whole buttercream thing, which I think I would have toned-down the butter quantity if I was doing it again.